Lehigh University
Lehigh Preserve
Theses and Dissertations
2001
Comfort and control : Trina and Frank Norris's
McTeague
Kelly Anne Grim
Lehigh University
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Grim, Kelly Anne, "Comfort and control : Trina and Frank Norris's McTeague" (2001). Theses and Dissertations. Paper 688.
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Grim, Kelly Anne
COMFORT AND·
CONTROL:
TRINAAND
FRANK·
NORRIS·S...
June 2001
Comfort and Control: Trina and Frank Norris's McTeague
by
Kelly Anne Grim
A Thesis
Presented to the Graduate and Research Committee
of Lehigh University
in Candidacy for the Degree of
Master of Arts
m
Engli6h
Lehigh University
May,200l
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to Dawn Keetly for her encouragement and direction.
Thank you to Seth Moglen who supported me from the start and who has helped turn
this paper into something rather meaningful to me.
Thank you to my family and fiance who continue to support me.
111
TABLE OF CONTENTS
~~ct
1
Comfort and Control: Trina and Frank Norris's McTeague
2
Works Cited
19
About the Author
20
IV
ABSTRACT
In this paper, I attempt to show that Trina, in Frank Norris's McTeague, is not the
masochistic, money-loving monster she might appear to be. I refute Spangler's claim
that Trina is Norris's version of the "fatal woman," who knowingly and willingly wreaks
havoc on McTeague's life (as well as her own) because of her madness for money. I
attempt to show that she is merely using what's at her disposal to grasp a certain amount
of agency in a world that doesn't want her to have it. I demonstrate how she finds the
comfort and control she needs in her work, in her management of the house and
McTeague, and most explicitly, in the miserly, and sometimes erotic, relationship she has
with her money. Trina is a victim and, as such, to blame for nothing but seeking comfort
and lost control.
1
Comfort and Control: Trina and Frank Norris's MeTeague
George M. Spangler, in an article written in 1978 entitled "The Structure of
MeTeague, " offered a reading of Frank Norris's novel that names MeTeague the victim
ofNorris's version ofthe "fatal woman" (94). The second half of the novel, according to
Spangler, sees Trina as a woman whose "economics are unnecessarily severe" (94) and
who degrades her husband, as well as herself, until he has to turn to cruelty and
ultimately murder to get what he wants. Spangler even suggests that though Trina's
murder is abominable, "Norris quite skillfully manages to make the reader feel at least
some sympathy for MeTeague and none for Trina" (95).
What Spangler's reading does is recognize that something Trina possesses or can
do is in some way not only threatening to MeTeague but is willfully directed at or against
him. This enables the reader to demonize Trina, as Spangler does, and suggests that her
behavior is not only responsible for but also deserving of her punishment and death. .
What is interesting about Spangler's reading is that he recognizes and is responding to
something very important: the fact that Trina becomes a threatening figure. Recognizing
Trina as this threat necessarily affords her a certain kind of power, or something like it,
and Spangler understands this power to have everything to do with her owning and
hoarding of money.
After a first reading of MeTeague, it is rather easy to see Trina as a weird version
..v
of the classic "fatal woman." Norris calls Trina a "strange" (310) woman in her
hoarding, but what is even more striking is that he seems to present Trina as a monstrous
woman for her love of money. After McTeague has stolen her money,
2
Her love of money for the money's sake brooded in her heart,
driving out by degrees every other natural affection. She grew thin
and meager; her flesh clove and tight to her small skeleton; her
small pale mouth and little uplifted chine grew to have a certain
feline eagerness of expression; her long, narrow eyes glistened
continually, as if they caught and held the glint of metal (354).
Her physical appearance changes for the worse;- her health suffers. Trina is a mad
woman, maybe a maniac with glistening eyes and only care in the world, her money.
Furthermore, Norris turns Trina's interaction with the money into something erotic, and
in his depiction ofthis eroticism renders her even more monstrous. In the following
scene, one witnesses Trina sharing her bed with her money:
(?
Not a day passed that Trina did not have it out where she could see
and touch it. One evening she had even spread all the gold pieces
between the sheets, and had then gone to bed, stripping herself, and
had slept all night upon the money, taking a strange and ecstatic
pleasUre in the touch of the smooth, flat pieces the length of her
entire body (360-1).
A stripped and naked Trina literally spends the night in bed with her money experiencing
the "ecstatic pleasure" of a lover. In reference to this scene, William E. Cain, in an
article that debates the extent to which Norris is present in the text and tries to understand
Norris's dealings with power, suggests that Norris knows he's depicting something
bizarre and horrifying when he depicts Trina's sex with the money. Cain also suggests
no matter how "horrifying" Trina~erverse love-making" is, "it is mingled for the
reader with Norris's own pleasure in presenting... as though to allow us to peer into the
privacies of a woman's bedroom (210-11). The use of the word "even" does seem to
suggest that this is behavior on Trina's part that is transgressing boundaries that set what
3
is acceptable and that which is "strange" and even beyond strange. The use of the word
"even" also does seem to indicate that Norris is aware ofthis extreme behavior.
~
Norris refers to her other innate desire, her "pleasure in yielding" as "strange and
unnatural" (309), and what this might be evidence of is "discomfort" on Norris' part, his .
fear of Trina manifesting itself in the narrative. Norris moves beyond the less damaging
critique of "strange" and calls her love of brutality "perverted" and "morbid" and
"unwholesome" (309-10). His depiction of Trina in this regard as well becomes
som~thing
bordering monstrous; Norris even depicts Trina taking a "strange sort of
pride" (310) in her masochistic pleasure. In a startling and unsettling scene, Trina and
Maria talk about their beatings, "each trying to make out that her own husband was the
most cruel" (310). Both women "[glory] in their husband's mistreatment" (311) and even
fabricate stories and invent details, "magnifying their own mistreatment" (311). Showing
Trina participating in this bizarre contest, these "long and excited arguments" (311)
seems to be another way for Norris to turn her pleasure in masochism into something that
is horrifying and even monstrous.
I feel however, that the death scene is one in which Norris 'shows sympathy for
Trina and actually undoes all of his monstrous insinuations. She was once such a'pretty
woman and did work she was good at and proud of, and in this scene she is reduced to a
woman wearing a "dirty cotton gown" that "clung about her shapeless, stunted figure"
(372) working "down on her hands and knees in the midst of a steaming muck of soapy
water" (372), a scene that suggests her desperation and unhappiness and her new, even
more miserable existence. Even though it is her resistance that drives McTeague to kill
her, the stark description of her murder is horrifying:
4
[McTeague] came back at her again, his eyes drawn to two fine
twinkling points, and his enormous fists, clenched till the knuckles
whitened, raised in the air.
Then it became abominable.
In the schoolroom outside, behind the coal scuttle, the cat
listened to the sounds. of stamping and struggling and the muffled
noise of blows, wildly terrified, his eyes bulging like brass knobs
(375).
The reader experiences the murder through the ears of a frightened cat. Readers can only
hear the "stamping and struggling" and the "noise of blows" along with the cat. The
actual murder isn't described because the narration shifts from a description of the couple
to the point of view ofthe cat outside, and one line marks this transition: "Then it became
abominable." Giving readers that simple line and a few audible clues is perhaps more
bleak than an actual description would have been in that a reader is left to imagine the
horrific crime being committed. Add to this stark statement, the description of the
"terrified" cat with "bulgirig»eyes and the ghastly description that follows of "her body
twitching with an occasional hiccough that stirred the pool of blood in which she lay face
downward" (377-8) juxtaposed by the casual description ofthe children sniffing the air
that smelled like a butcher shop and the "funnee" cat and how he pressed his nose under
the door ofthe cloakroom and wagged his tail both "excited" and "very eager" (378), and
the scene is definitely much more horrifying than any scene in which Trina loves her
money.
In addition, a calm McTeague after the murder leaves his wife's unconscious and
hiccoughing body, enters her room, takes her money, comments offhandedly on the
weather, washes his hands and forearms and then changes into his work clothes without
so much as a hint of guilt or remorse or even disbelief, and his complete Jack of remorse
5
for the rest of the novel is even more horrifying. There is no doubt that Trina is the
victim, that the scene shows Trina as the victim of a horrific murder by.a beast of a man,
who possesses an "ape-like agility" (375) and the strength to tear the lock and bolt guard
off the door and send "her staggering across the room" (373). I feel that readers are left
thinking that McTeague has done a brutal and disgusting thing to a woman undeserving",
of this and will want to condemn him.
In 1995, MarY Beth Werner made an attempt to put the novel into its historical
context in order to show that the novel foregrounds and ultimately critiques the picture of
domestic violence just as I've attempted to argue above. What this seems to suggest is
that feminist critics might have begun to see the need to respondto and refute readings
akin to Spangler's, that there is the need to show that the text doesn't champion misogyny
and that Trina, despite her strange and sometimes cruel behavior, .isn't responsible for her
own punishment.·· Werner suggests that Trina and Maria are not to blame for their
victimization even as she explains the ways in which Trina's power is threatening to the
patriarchal society in the novel. I aim to discuss what that power is for Trina, where it
comes from, and most importantly what it does fot her. I differ from Spangler in that I
intend to show that it is not a power that is specifically directed at or against McTeague.
I want to show that Trina is a victim in the narrative and that she is using what's at her
disposal to find an autonomous, self-contained space in which to grasp a certain amount
of agency in her world. Trina is doing everything she can to try to find comfort and to
have some control over something in a world that limits and even brutalizes the women
in it.
.
./
6
Trina's control as the way in which she gains meaning in her life can be seen
early in the text in her work. Trina's housework is something that allows her to find
some meaning through her mastery of a skill, but more importantly, she's in charge of the
domestic space and it is this ability to control and maintain their home that grants her
power. Norris states that "Trina would be an extraordinarily good housekeeper" and that
"economy" is her "strong point" (134). Trina is always busying herself with the
\
housework, making breakfast, clearing away the breakfast things, making the bed, and
dusting - it was a routine that seemed to offer Trina stability. She uses her housework
and her control of the domestic sphere to comfort herself. For instance, following a fight
with McTeague over money, "their first serious quarrel" (200), Trina begins to "cut the
heads off a fresh bunch of onions" (207) and tells McTeague to go away by saying that
she'd like to have her kitchen to herself. The kitchen is a space she feels she owns, that
she has control over. Her heart breaks as she has to sell her kitchen utensils and the
narrator exclaims, "How happy had she been the day after the marriage when she had
first entered that kitchen and knew that it was all her own!" (275).
Even in her attempt to improve McTeague, "T.rina waS tactful enough to move so
cautiously and with such slowness that the dentist was unconscious of any process of
change" (190). Trina is successful in her attempts and the dentist improves under her
influence. She breaks McTeague of his eating and drinking habits. She dresses him
properly with clean linen shirts. Maybe most importantly, what the narrator says is "most
wonderful of all" (191), Trina lends McTeague ambitions, "confused ideas of something
better" (191) and it is through these that both share this dream of something better.
7
In addition to her mastery of her domestic space and the housework, Trina also
works for her Uncle Oelbermann, whittling and painting Noah's Ark figurines. Trina
performs her work on the figurines very quickly and easily:
One after another she caught up the little blocks of straight-grained
pine, the knife flashed between her fingers, the little figure grew
rapidly under her touch, was finished and ready for painting in a
wonderfully short time, and was tossed into the basket that stood at
her elbow (182).
Not only is her work finished quickly and effortlessly, but she's also very good at it: "She
turns the little figurines in her fingers with a wonderful lightness and deftness" (288).
She gains a genuine pleasure and pride as a result of her accomplishment. She enjoys her
ability to do autonomous work and is "very proud to explain her work to MeTeague as he
had already his own to her (133), putting herself on his level, sharing with him the ability
to do a craft and to do it well.
The most obvious arid greatest source of Trina's power, the reason why she
becomes such a threat in McTeague's eyes, is the money. Trina wins the lottery money
and hoards both it and the money she makes from Mr. Oelbermann. The threat to
McTeague's masculinity early in the novel begins with Trina's Winning ofthe lottery
money, because it offers her the opportunity to possess something, to bean owner of
something, which is a role really only gr~ted men in the novel. Men possess not only
material objects but also women in this world, and the narrative is not shy about the fact
that "she belonged to him, body and soul" (89). So that shortly after MeTeague has come
to possess her though marriage, she happily comes to possess a rather large sum of
money. And this money in addition to the money she earns and hoards gives her great
pleasure through ownership, and this ownership means much to her. When McTeague
8
suggests they share ownership of the money, Trina cries out "vehemently": "'It's all
mine, mine'" (272), and when McTeague has-taken her money, she cries, "' ... my
money's gone, my dear money - my dear, dear gold pieces that I've worked so hard for'"
(347). Clearly, Trina feels a sense of pride in the ownership but maybe more so in her
ability to earn the money, to have worked hard to be able to possess it.
Trina hides the money away in a brass match-safe at the bottom of her trunk, and
this money she hoards, the dollars, half-dollars and gold pieces, is empowering for her in
that it offers her the chance to act in many ways, experience many things, and enjoy it.
Trina can watch the money accumulate and she can see the size of the money increase.
She can actively add to the sum of her money and "each time she added a quarter or a
half dollar to the little store she laughed and sang with a veritable delight" (188). What
thrilled her was not that it was a large sum, "but that it could be made larger" (188). She
found joy in counting it carefully, recounting and making piles with it, even arranging
them "in patterns - triangles, circles, and squares" (357). She took care of it, and even
"rubbed the gold pieces between the fold of her apron until they shone" (209). She plays
with the money for long periods oftime. She piles the money and then she "[draws] back.
to the farthest comer ofthe room to note the effect" (308).
Trina can also completely control who knows about the money and what they
know, and she begins to lie about how much money she begins to lie to McTeague about
how much she's spending and how much she's saving. She appears to find pleas~e in
lying to him, in tricking him, and even in denying him any of her money, but Trina is not
. 'trying to degrade their lives as "the destroyer" that Spangler claims she is. Trina truly
isn't intentionally manipulating McTeague, she doesn't want to have to manipulate him
9
to keep her money, for she is not made happy in her manipulation of him. "I can't help
it" (219) she says.· In fact, often she experiences great regret over having denied him the
money he asks for and is "sorry she had refused to help her husband" (208).
Furthermore, she actually entertains fantasies of pleasing McTeague by giving him the
money he asks for:
She began to be sorry she had refused to help her husband, sorry
she had brought matters to such an issue... She loved her "old bear:
too much to do him an injustice, and perhaps, alfter all, she had
been in the wrong. Then it occurred to her how pretty it would be
to come up behind him unexpectedly, and slip the money, thirtyfive dollars, into his hand, and pull his huge head down to her an
kiss his bald spot, (208).
Trina loves McTeague and there is no doubt that she would actually like to give him the
money, and yet even though she wants to, she just can't give the money up. "It's too
pretty" (209) she says and after she's counted out ten silver dollars to give him, the sight
of her "withered" bag is just too "lamentable" (209) and she can't bear to give him the
,
money and see the size of it diminish. Furthermore, this response is not limited to
McTeague. Trina can't bring herself to send twenty-five dollars to her own mother.
Trina makes up excuses like they were "hard up themselves for that month" (251), and
sends McTeague's twelve dollars, but she can never send her own money.
Ironically, Trina hoards her money even when she could spend it to ease her own
suffering. In this light, the money doesn't offer Trina what we might expect it to:
economic success or monetary wealth and the means to buy and provide for herself. She
eases her suffering with her money in another way. Seeing her money, seeing and
knowing she has this possession, offers her some sort of comfort, having it grants her
solace. For Trina, the money is "a thing miraculous" (154) and the narrator calls the
10
money a "deus ex machina or "god-from-the machine, suddenly descending upon the
stage of her hiunble little life" (154). She believes that the money is a gift from God, a
gift with the ability to save her; She believes that it might actually raise her up out of her
humble life. She invests the lottery money in Uncle Oelbermann's business and when
things get rough, after the brutality begins, one way Trina copes is that she imagines this
money as a "glittering, splendid dream, which came to her almost every hour of the day
as a solace and compensation for all her unhappiness" (307-8). In this way, the five
thousand comes to serve Trina in that the money offers her a psychic space, allows her a
means to literally imagine finding some happiness in her misery and thus grants her that
happiness. ,The money gives her the means to fantasize, to find animagined space in
which she is happy.
After Trina and McTeague are forced to fmd another dwelling, a room that
according to Trina was "not gay" (288), she feels that her life is deteriorating and also no
longer gay. It is around this time that Trina's work and housework suffer, those things
that earlier had brought her meahing and pleasure and a sense of control. She still
performs her whittling for Uncle Oebermann but she is no longer careful, she is no longer
concerned with efficacy, and she is no longer concerned with cleanliness. She doesn't
wear the gloves she used to wear and "the whittling and chips accumulate under the
window where she did her work" (288). In addition "streaks and spots of the "nonpoisonous" paint that Trina used were upon the walls and woodwork" (288). Trina pays
little attention to her housework for Norris tells the reader that she was "nbt quite so
scrupulously tidy now as she was in the old days" (287). ,In addition, she can no longer
improve McTeague. He is fired from his job and has begun to drink a lot and demand
~
11
money from Trina that she just can't bear to give him. She says to McTeague "I never
saw you this way before. You talk like a different man" (297). She is losing her
influence on McTeague and his dreams for betterment; her mastery of.her work and the
domestic sphere isn't as fulfilling as it once was, it doesn't mean as much to Trina. 'fIer
mastery is vulnerable,. fragile, uncertain, for after McTeague has bitten her fingers raw
and she's poisoned from the paint, she loses her fingers and can no longer even perform
her work.
As everything else disappears, it is in the money that Trina finds her only
pleasure. She no longer even keeps up her appearance: "Trina lost her pretty ways and
her good looks" (355). During the winter of their first year of marriage, "it was a passion
with [Trina] to save money" (188), and it is no coincidence that during this time, "the
tempest of passion, that overpowering desire that had suddenly taken possession of
[MeTeague] that day when he had given her ether...rarely stirred in him now" (189).
Trina demands his love: "Oh, Mac, dear, love me, love me big" (186). She must sense
his fading passion for she seeks to hear MeTeague confirm his love for her: "Do you love
me, Mac, dear?" (186). This loss oflove from her husband and her need for love might
be why Trina feels the need to love something and begins an erotic relationship with her
money. After the "grind began" (284), when her work will no longer comfort her, her
interaction with the money goes from seeing and piling and wiping it t~ feeling and
smelling and even tasting and listening to it. She "put[s] the smaller gold pieced in her
mouth" (308) and listens to "the delicious clink of the pieces tUmbling against each
other" (357). The gold becomes still something more for herby providing her yet another
form of agency, the ability to carry out it sensual and even affectionate relationship:
12
Trina loved her money with an intensity that she could hardly
express. She would plunge her small fingers into the pile with
little murmurs of affection, her long, narrow eyes half closed and
shining, her breath coming in long sighs (71?);
Trina's"play" (308) with her money - the plunging of her fingers, the "murmurs of
affection," the narrow, shining eyes and sighs - suggests this interaction is sexual in
nature. It is after this play that Trina addresses her gold "dear money" (308) as she would
"Mac, dear" and actually confesses to her money, "I love you so!" (308). Trina's sexual
possession of her money mirrors McTeague's earlier sexual desire for her. She "gather[s]
the gleaming heaps of gold pieces to her with both arms, burying her face in them with
long sighs of unspeakable delight" (359) in much the same manner that McTeague, while
in Trina's Closet before they were married, "opened his huge arms and gathered the little
garments close to him, plunging his face deep amongst them, savoring their delicious
odor with long breaths of luxury and supreme content" (79). This suggests that just as
McTeague's excitement is found in objects, her clothes, upon her absence, Trina might
find pleasure and sexual excitement in objects, gold coins, upon the "absence" of
McTeague's love for her.
Trina's life has "narrowed" to two pleasures: "her passion for her money and her
perverted love for her husband when he was brutal" (310). Norris goes to great lengths to
show that Trina receives much pleasure in the brutality &he receives from McTeague:
...this brutality made Trina all the more affectionate; aroused in
her a morbid and unwholesome love of submission, a strange
unnatural pleasure in yielding, in surrendering herself to the will of
an irresistible, virile power (309-10).
It seems that the submission that terrified Trina on their wedding night, that troubled
Trina the night McTeague proposed to her, and an abominable form of it, has become
13
.
something she enjoys and revels in. Jessica Benjamin, in The Bonds ofLove, explains
how the organization of Western society prompts women to believe that they are nothing
alone, that their sense of self is shaped by their self-sacrifice. It would appear t?-at Trina,
in her pleasure in masochism, is an example of this belief. She loves McTeague "more
and more, not for what he was, but for what she had given up to him" (186). She "had
merged her individuality into his" (183), confirming that she is no longer her own person,
that she has her subjectivity only in her submission to McTeague. In other words, it is
her very submission that defines her. For McTeague to leave would have been more
devastating for Trina than his brutality, and she endures, and even enjoys, it because it is
her only model of identity.
Both Norris and this naturalist text present Trina as a particular representative of
womanhood that harbors inside "something strong and overpowering" (88): an innate
desire to yield to man. After McTeague takes "her in his enormous arms" and kisses her
"grossly, full on the mouth" (84), Trina "gave up in an instant" (88). With his "sheer
brute force" (88),
McTeague has awakened the Woman, and, whether she would or
no, she was his now irrevocably; struggle against it as she would:
she belonged to him, body and soul, for life or death. She had not
sought it, she had not desired it. The spell was laid upon her (89).
According to the text, becoming a woman seems to mean that one desires to yield to man,
and that this yielding is an unavoidable, even if unwanted, desire. Shortly after his
proposal, Trina decides that she doesn't love McTeague and vows to tell him so, but she
loses her resolve and her desire to push him away as McTeague "grip[s]d her to him in a
bearlike embrace that all but smother[s] her" (90).
14
,
This naturalist text, however, does something more with Trina's desire to yield: it
couples this desire with an equal and innate fear of McTeague. MeTeague expresses a
desire to marry her immediately following his violation of her on the dentist chair, and
Trina is "suddenly seized with the fear of him, the intuitive feminine fear of the male"
. (33). She is "frightened at his huge hands...his immense square-cut head and his
enormous brute strength" (33). On their wedding night, Trina is again plagued by her
fe;:rr of him. As McTeague tries to embrace her, she shrinks from him, "suddenly seized
with the fear of him - the intuitive feminine fear ofthe male - her whole being quailed
before him" (179). She even cries out, "'No, no - I'm afraid'" (179).
Her fear ofMcTeague arises at moments of submission for Trina and thus seems
intimately connected to her submission. The fear of McTeague Trina experiences on
.their wedding night is most likely the fear of her submission to him in the consummation
of their marriage - th~ thought of her submission to "his powerful, salient jaw, his huge,
red hands" and "his enormous, resistless strength" (179). The fear seems to be in the
possibility that she can't free herself of him and his "hands" and his "strength." It is so
extreme, that even her own desire to submit that had "leaped to life in her" (88) at the
train station "frightened her ...
as she thought of it" (88).
The fact that Trina's fear of MeTeague is more likely the fear of her own
~
submission to him means that Trina's desires are ambivalent or contradictory in nature.
On Trina's wedding night, her fear eventually gives way to "her great love for
McTeague" (180) and she "[gives] up to him as she had done before, yielding all at once
to that strange desire of being conquered and subdued" (180). In this passage, Trina
yields not only to McTeague but also to the "strange" desire to do it. What Norris seems
15
tOHsuggest is that while it may be natural, and even pleasurable, to want to submit, there is
something "strange" about Trina's desire because at the same time she fears doing it.
It is, by now, very clear that Trina fears submitting to, or yielding to, McTeague,
and the reason I've dwelt on this fear is because I want to move to the effect of it. The
fear of losing herself, of losing control, is acted out or compensated for in her
manipulation of the money. Barbara Hochman, in an article contending that habits and
routines of daily life serve to stabilize and that habit gives way to obsession when danger
_arises, argues exactly that. She asserts that Trina's hoarding is a strategy employed by
her to protect and defend herself from the experience of, or fear of, loss. More explicitly,
Hochman argues that "it is the meaning of surrender for Trina herself that accounts for
her fear and finally for the conversion of her 'little habits' into her uncontrollable
obsession" (69). I wouldn't want to deny Trina a'''real'' pleasure in submission, but that
pleasure must mask or hide a true fear.ofloss, or lost control. This fear does serve to tum
her "little habit" of saving money into an "uncontrollable obsession" with hoarding, and
as Hochman contends her hoarding "leaves her with a temporary feeling ?f gain and
control rather than with a sense of loss" (70).
~
I agree with Hochman in that Trina's hoarding is a compensation for loss that
does indeed grant her a feeling of "gain and control." She enjoys her mastery of the
money - her ability to keep it and store it and deny others of it - and this mastery is an
indicator of Trina's desire for it, even need for it. She needs this control so much so that
she won't give up the money even when faced with her own death. Even "beside herself
with terror" and fighting for her life with the "exasperation and strength of a harassed
~~~t"{37?)'_1'ri?~_resists
McTeague and stands resolutely in her decision to keep the
16-----
money. But this scene; her death scene, and the very fact that "the more her husband-.stormed, the tighter she drew the strings of the chamois-skin bag" (307) suggests that her
hoarding is in direct response to the threat and realization of the brutal nature of her
husband.
I differ from Hochman in that I don't believe that Trina's hoarding is the only
way in which Trina compensates for loss; this is only part of the dynamic working for
Trina in the text. As I've already established, Trina's money makes her an owner, as
opposed to a thing owned, an agent with the ability to completely control her money, and
allows her to experience pleasure in it through tactile and sensual experiences. And
)
lastly, Hochman doesn't take up the fact that Trina's obsession with the money becomes
erotic, which I've argued could be in response to yet another loss Trina experiences, not a
loss of herself or ~er control of herself, but in response to her inability to control
McTeague and in particularly his feelings for her. Trina feels yet another loss with the
loss of MeTeague's love, and must act out a loving, emotional exchange with the only
thing she has, her money. I also don't feel that the feeling is temporary as Hochman
suggests, nor do I fully want to claim that this relationship with her money is a negative
thing. In some very clear ways, Trina's obsession with money is bad, as one does have to
admit that her money ultimately fails her in death, but it is an outlet for Trina, and it
becomes one of the only ways that Trina can fmd comfort, never mind control. It
continues to be the only thing that provides her over and over again with any solace.
When her money is taken from her, for example, Trina resorts to getting and having the
money invested in Uncle Oelberman's business, and she relies even more so on her
particularly sexual relationship with it to find some control and comfort. Her desire for
17
her money comes "upon her all of a sud<1en" and during these fits "her cheeks flushed,
her eyes glistened, her breath came short" (358). She allows herself to have a little bit of
her money at a time, she "content[s] herself with only twenty" (358) at one point and then
a "debauch of five hundred" (358) another time. If anything her desire for her money is
something she enacts more frequently to "content" herself.
To argue that Trina's need for control might be one that Norris recognizes and
wants to grant her by giving her a relationship with the money - thevery thing that I've
argued offers her comfort, agency and pleasure in a world that doesn't want to offer these
things to her - might be optimistic and hopeful. It is clear, however, that Norris seems to
understand the horrors that exist for a woman in a completely misogynist world for both
Trina and Maria are brutally murdered for having something that their husbands want
"
~om them,
something society doesn't want its women to have and hoard: money. It also
seems that what society doesn't want its women to have is the opportunity to have
control. By giving Trina this money, I've argued that Norris is granting her a way to hold
onto that which gives her pleasure and control in a world that wants to strip her of her
ability to control, a world that asks her to yield. Through her money, Trina can have
agency and even express love, but what troubles this optimistic depiction is that face that
Norris doesn't valorize her possession ofmoney; he makes it a horrible and monstrous
thing. What I believe might be closer to the truth is that Norris doesn't know how to
present Trina, that he is tom between wanting to condemn her for fear of her power like
.
she is a victim and
his male characters in the novel and at the same time knowing that
.
that in such a brutal victimization, a woman might need to be or act a little bit "strange."
18
WORKS CITED '
Cain, William E. "Presence and Power in McTeague." American Realism: New Essays.
Ed. Eric J. Sundquist. Baltimore, JHU, 1982. 199-214.
Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds ofLove. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.
Hochman, Barbara. "Loss, Habit, Obsession: The Governing Dynamic ofMcTeague."
The Art ofFrank Norris, Storyteller. Ed. BarbaraHochman. Columbia: U of
Missouri Press, 1988.
Norris, Frank. McTeague. New York: Penguin Books, 1982
Spangler, George M. "The Structure of McTeague." Critical Essays on Frank Norris.
Ed. Don Graham. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1980.
Werner, Mary Beth. "'A Vast and Terrible Drama': Frank Norris's Domestic Violence
Fantasy in McTeague." Frank Norris Studies 19 (Spring 1994): 1-4
19
About the Author
Kelly Anne Grim was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania on 22 March 1975 to Ronald L.
Grim and Emelia J. Grim. She attended Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
where she received a B.A. in English and a B.S. in Biochemistry and graduated with
Honors in January 1998. After graduating, Kelly spent one year and a half in the
biotechnology industry working as a Research Assistant at Human Genome Sciences,
Inc. in Rockville, Maryland. Currently, she is finishing her M.A. in English at Lehigh
University and graduating in June 2001.
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